The Harper Shift is a month-long look at how Canada has changed over a decade of Conservative government – and at what kind of country we want to become. Here Evan Fraser and Samantha Pascoal consider our growing food insecurity.

Without a doubt, global food security sits close to the top on any list of major challenges facing the planet over the next generation. But for Canada, and Canadian politicians, this issue barely resonates. We are blessed with abundant farmland and (mostly) wealthy consumers. We may even benefit from the earth’s changing climate in the form of a longer growing season. But ignoring food security would be a mistake.

In a number of ways, Canada has taken major steps backwards over the past 10 years.

The first issue is poverty. According to Food Banks Canada, which is the national umbrella for food banks, there has been a 25 per cent increase in food bank visits between 2008 and 2014. These charities are used by 841,000 Canadians every month (310,000 of whom are children); they received 14 million visits in 2014.

While this increase is a national phenomenon, some areas have been particularly hard hit. In the Territories, food bank use is up almost 250 per cent in the past six years. This was highlighted in 2012 when the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food visited our country. His damming report pointed out that First Nations — both on and off reserves — are particularly vulnerable and cited data that show 17.8 per cent of First Nations adults aged 25-39 and 16.1 per cent of adults age 40-54 reported being hungry.

The second issue is what is happening on our farms. Notwithstanding exciting developments including the Canada-Ontario Environmental Farm program, and commitments by major retailers to do a better job of sourcing more sustainably, over the past 10 years, we have seen Canadian farmers plant significantly more corn and soybeans (up by a third in terms of hectares between 2006 and 2013) and less forage crops and vegetables (we lost about 6,000 hectares of vegetable production). From an environmental perspective, therefore, we are losing crop diversity and this means poorer soil health and more agrochemicals. According to the UN, pesticide use in particular has risen between 2006 and 2010 (the last year for which data are available).

The nutritional implications of this shift are also important. Moving away from producing vegetables and towards cereals and oils has been made possible by trading agreements that allow us to import the vast majority of our fruits and vegetables from places like California. This is a fine system when it works, but the low Canadian dollar and the drought in California mean that our food prices, and in particular the price of a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, are rising much faster than inflation.

As a result, our domestic food supply looks pretty dismal. As most of us know, nutritional guidelines suggest about 50 per cent of our diets, when measured in dietary servings, should be fruits and vegetables. However, when we convert the food we have in Canada into dietary servings, we discover that only 11 per cent of our food is actually fruit and vegetables. Meanwhile, about a quarter of our food supply are oils and fats (which should only make up about 3 per cent of our diets) and another quarter of our supply are sugars, which we should be cutting back on.

While it would be tempting to simply blame consumers’ love of fat and sugar, or farmers’ chasing high corn and soy prices, for this situation in many ways these issues are linked to policy.

One of the negative consequences of the large trading agreements that our federal government has embraced has been a loss in our food processing industry. Because our vegetable farmers are relatively uncompetitive when compared with California, New Mexico or Florida, liberal trade agreements have allowed North America’s fruit and vegetable processing industry to move south. This means that Canada has lost more than 143 food manufacturing plants and shed 24,000 jobs since 2008. It also means fewer markets for vegetable producers.

And here we see how these issues — the rise in food banks, the crops we plant, and the contents of our food supply — are linked. We have committed ourselves to a global food system that, despite all its considerable benefits, has harmed our capacity to process fruits and vegetables close to home. This means that fruit and vegetable prices in particular are vulnerable to economic factors like a low Canadian dollar or the California drought, and the evidence suggests that the Canadian food system now struggles to provide adequate nutritious food for all its citizens.

Evan Fraser is a Canada Research Chair and Professor of Geography at the University of Guelph where he is affiliated with the Food Institute. Samantha Pascoal is an undergraduate research assistant.

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